Everything has been explained. There is nothing left to consider. The explanation can no longer be treated as a definition. The question: a description. The answer: not explanation, but a description and knowing how to consider it. Asking or telling: there isn't any difference.
The final elegance: assuming, asking the question. No answers. No explanations. "Why do you demand explanations? If they are given, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present." The solution: not an explanation: a description and knowing how to consider it.
Experience a minute. Experience an hour. Can you experience a minute and an hour together, simultaneously, at the same time? This is an important question to ask.
No explanation, no solution, but consideration of the question. "Every proposition proposing a fact must in its complete analysis propose the general character of the universe required for the fact." The description, the proposition: not a definition, but a commission. "Understanding a commission means: knowing what one has got to do."
Any new style, any new life, any new world, is but a god where gods are no longer valid. "The god that one so finds is but a word born of words, and returns to the word. For the reply we make to ourselves is assuredly never anything other than the question itself."
"Our kind of innovation consists not in the answers, but in the true novelty of the questions themselves; in the statement of problems, not in their solutions." What is important is not "to illustrate a truth—or even an interrogation—known in advance, but to bring to the world certain interrogations . . . not yet known as such to themselves."
A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in fantastic amounts of data, or in huge libraries filled with books. There's no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative. Ask the most subtle sensibilities in the world what questions they are asking themselves.
— from By the Late John Brockman, 1969
The final elegance: assuming, asking the question. No answers. No explanations. "Why do you demand explanations? If they are given, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present." The solution: not an explanation: a description and knowing how to consider it.
Experience a minute. Experience an hour. Can you experience a minute and an hour together, simultaneously, at the same time? This is an important question to ask.
No explanation, no solution, but consideration of the question. "Every proposition proposing a fact must in its complete analysis propose the general character of the universe required for the fact." The description, the proposition: not a definition, but a commission. "Understanding a commission means: knowing what one has got to do."
Any new style, any new life, any new world, is but a god where gods are no longer valid. "The god that one so finds is but a word born of words, and returns to the word. For the reply we make to ourselves is assuredly never anything other than the question itself."
"Our kind of innovation consists not in the answers, but in the true novelty of the questions themselves; in the statement of problems, not in their solutions." What is important is not "to illustrate a truth—or even an interrogation—known in advance, but to bring to the world certain interrogations . . . not yet known as such to themselves."
A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in fantastic amounts of data, or in huge libraries filled with books. There's no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative. Ask the most subtle sensibilities in the world what questions they are asking themselves.
— from By the Late John Brockman, 1969